JEAN RUSTIN FOUNDATION

A UNIQUE RETROSPECTIVE

The straightforward confrontation with the painting remains the ultimate experience and the purpose of the artist. Since the late 1950s, Rustin’s work has been exhibited in many institutions across continents, and the new foundation intends to continue to allow the work to travel. It is thus conceiving a major traveling retrospective. This unparalleled event will cover the artist’s career from his first drawings to the very last productions, presenting the fullness of his career for the first time and offering the public a meaningful confrontation between the earlier and later pieces. It can now develop new spaces for dialogue by presenting the most striking pieces, transforming a simple journey into real immersion. 

DIALOGUES

To prevent the foundation from becoming a closed space, its members also set themselves the task of organizing exhibitions bringing together the works of other artists whose art relates, in one way or another, to Rustin’s. It wishes to create proposals in which the artworks could echo each other and whose confrontation would create new perspectives. The public will thus have the privilege of freely associating the thoughts that may arise from the richness of these dialogues. This approach is critical to the foundation because it makes it possible to highlight the polysemy of the artworks and their deep vibrations brought to the surface thanks to the proximity of “sister artworks.” The opportunity will thus be given to see embodied in very different forms and approaches, the fundamental questions that link powerful works together and, therefore, to touch their universal dimension.

CONFERENCES AND VISITS

Always considering the need to offer the richest and most complete experience possible, the public will be invited to follow different cycles of conferences and events designed to unfold Rustin’s work. They will also be invited to take part in guided tours organized during the temporary exhibitions or on other occasions, thus renewing access to the collection. The Jean Rustin Foundation wishes to remain open to any proposal related to the artist’s work: researchers, critics, art historians, or enthusiasts will be able to shed different lights on the work to lead the public beyond the shock of the initial impact that such a painting can sometimes create.

ABOUT AND AROUND RUSTIN

While the exhibition is the ideal setting to discover the painter’s artworks, the Jean Rustin Foundation sees books as a powerful way to infiltrate its substance. The foundation combines all the publications released during and beyond the painter’s life, from the first exhibition catalog to the most recent editions, including monographs and numerous books published in collaboration with artists, poets, writers, and doctors. They join Verbaet’s library, which contains thousands of books about the artists he collects and those directly related to the themes embraced by Rustin. Themes that have been ever-reconsidered since the dawn of art history: mainly the body, the metamorphoses of the flesh, and our unrelenting finitude. The library comprises volumes dedicated to  Goya, Bonnard, Ensor, Bacon, Toulouse-Lautrec, Ribera, or Caravaggio, but also to La Tour, Hals or Le Nain, the artists of the past who have left their mark on history as well as the contemporaries who also seem to bear affinities with Rustin, from Diane Arbus to Berlinde de Bruyckere, David Lynch or the CoBrA group. There are also volumes on art in general, post-war art in particular, sexuality, eroticism, psychiatry, and anything dealing with the human figure, whether addressed from a historical, artistic, or scientific perspective. Other books relate to the notion of the uncanny, as Rustin never adhered to an entirely realistic idea to create a poetic universe of his own, moving away from the descriptive and capable of whispering to us what might lay beyond the known. 

NEW PUBLICATIONS 

Therefore, the Jean Rustin Foundation is home to many volumes, forming a rich soil for all forms of research on painting in general and Rustin in particular. But beyond the existing collection, it is already proud to have published a first book as part of its new circulation project, the fruit of a promise made by Verbaet to the art critic Roger Pierre Turine, who followed the painter since the 1990s and covered many of his exhibitions in the press. His exquisite writing and years-long friendship bring the sap of a rich exchange with the painter; fascinating comments are brought together in the extended interview that forms the first part of the volume, the second being a collection of articles by Turine and collected in the form of a diary. This first publication illustrates the determination of the foundation members to offer quality publications, a dive into the work on par with what its author brought into it. This brings us to the foundation’s major project, one that Verbaet has been dreaming about for years, namely the publication of a major monograph. 

THE RUSTIN MONOGRAPH

One of the most substantial publications released about Rustin is by Edward Lucie-Smith, an English critic and art historian who joined the first foundation when it was founded. That monograph, published in London, covered the painter’s career up to 1991. A decade after his death, the Jean Rustin Foundation wishes to publish the artist’s first complete monograph. The hindsight we have today makes the project unprecedented. Beyond considering the painter’s entire career by adding to the initial study the last twenty years of creation, it is now possible to explore the fantastic material made available by the recently acquired archives. The new chronological elements offer a precise sequence of events that marked the painter’s life, from the most subtle details to the decisive revolutions. Thus, the text that will form the body of the volume will emerge from the orchestration of all the material collected to form a solid basis for highlighting the crucial stages and redrawing the entire route, illustrated with hundreds of reproductions and other archival pieces. The book will also be an opportunity to bring together the most beautiful texts written about Rustin, including by Pascal Quignard, Marcel Moreau, Claude Louis-Combet, Claude Roffat, Kits Hilaire, and Bernard Noël. One-day encounters or long-standing friendships will also be illustrated by correspondence or photographs taken during visits to the studio. This new monograph is a large-scale project that Sandrine Lopez is developing step by step. Completing this book and the required inventory work will also be the opportunity to compile the catalog raisonné of the work. But for the time being, the photographer is busy writing: her various missions within the new foundation have required long dives into the painter’s universe, shedding new light onto the œuvre. She is thus quite naturally entrusted with the production of this monograph, which is also combined with the other major project of the foundation: a feature film that will deliver a different way of entering the artist’s world, between documentary and fiction.

JEAN RUSTIN: THE FILM

Thanks to the long writing process that forms the monograph’s basis, the richness of the archives, and her own experience as an artist, Sandrine Lopez embarks on making a film whose actual content she will know only at the end of the editing stage. While the current project for the monograph is to offer a detailed journey through the life and work of the painter according to a linear perspective, that of the film will be different. She wants to translate into images the powerful impact of this extraordinary work according to a principle that she cherishes: association. She aims to account for what was born from her long immersion in Rustin’s world, from discovery to assimilation, including everything that emerged during its dissection. This is because the monstrous material past her eyes has left traces. You do not swallow Rustin for years without anything happening during digestion. Thus, as the night dream distills its power of vision in the interlacing of the day1, whatever was brewed has left a trace. Beyond the paintings themselves or the thousands of drawings she has looked at, all the reproductions have also left their mark on her retina, not to mention the repercussions of letters, articles, guest books, or even the various writings and testimonies collected during the interviews she conducted with those who met the painter. All this created a fabric of associations that she now wishes to convey in images. Thus, the monograph will be the journey through a territory with markers and directions, while the film will offer a dive into a space, one of the imaginary linked to the work where the markers have disappeared, leaving the world of fantasy as the only guide. The sensory dimension will thus be highlighted, the main idea being to create an atmosphere free from the notion of borders that no longer needs to be thought of chronologically but organically, obeying a system of associations where everything becomes possible. Analysis, speculation, imagination, speech, image, fiction, and reality could merge or at least intertwine to act at a different level. The film will result from the setting in motion of an immense tapestry formed by the harvesting and arrangement of material (the woven threads) and their impact. The film will be a counterpoint to the exhibitions and the monograph, thus forming a triangle whose poles will offer a journey in Rustin.